The Wait
by HannahCMcAlea
Summary: ONE SHOT. Chihiro lost her memories of the Spirit World when she left, although she never quite shook away the feeling that she was waiting for something or SOMEONE. All these years later will Haku finally keep his promise and will Chihiro get her memories back? Short and sweet with just a little bit of fluff and an OC just for fun. Enjoy!


I waited. For a ten year old girl the wait was completely unbearable. The only problem was that I had entirely forgotten what I was supposed to be waiting for. It felt as if there was a fuzzy, grey patch in my memories. Sometimes a faceless pair of emerald green eyes would taunt me, swimming across my vision and haunting my dreams.

I remember a tunnel, a long black tunnel. My parents and I took a wrong turn while moving to our new home and out of curiosity, went down that tunnel. We then came out of it again and found that our car had a week's worth of leaves and dust in it, my flowers from my best friend long since shrivelled and dead. We then went to our new home and found that the movers had already installed our furniture. That night, I found that I was wearing a beautiful, shimmery hair tie in my hair. The days between these two events were cloudy.

At the tender age of ten, my inability to remember made me listless. My school work began to suffer and I frequently got into trouble. I visited more councillors than I care to remember, lying on countless sofas while they tried to get me to vent my feelings to them. To tell the truth I don't recall feeling anything.

Then almost as soon as it came, my depression left me and I moved on with my life. My school work got back on track and I began to make friends, once they started to get past the old, psychotic Chihiro. Nobody could explain this transformation in me, least of all myself, but didn't question it. My previous listlessness and lack of memory was pushed to the back of my mind as it was filled with algebra, learning and end of year exams. Normalcy returned in my life.

But one day, my lethargy returned.

"_You did it Chihiro!" _a male voice exclaimed in my head.

A pair of fine, almond-shaped, green eyes materialised slowly behind my closed eyes, shining in the darkness. I stared into them. I knew those eyes from somewhere but I couldn't place a finger on it. Something in my mind linked it with my lack of memories.

"Please help me; I need to remember what happened. I need to know who you are." I told the eyes. They blinked once before beginning to fade away.

"Wait!" I called but it was too late; they were gone.

"Um, Sen, you do know that you said that out loud, right?" A voice broke me out of my reverie.

I jumped upright in my seat and shook my head to clear my vision. My best friend, Haru, shook his head at me with a laugh. We met when I started attending my new school after moving. I never wanted him to become my friend, at that time being in the height of my depression, but he was persistent. He would never stop following me and talking to me so eventually, in annoyance; I gave in and sat with him. We were inseparable from that moment on; he was my only friend during those dark months. I made other friends eventually but Haru was special.

He was also one of the only people who would call me Sen, which was my my preferred nickname. Sen is the alternative pronunciation of the first character of my name, Chi. When I was called Sen it felt special, though I had no clue why. I automatically associated that with my mental block, as I did with everything I couldn't explain.

I looked down at the sketch book on the table in front of me. As usual I had drawn a dragon, a dragon with white scales and aqua-coloured mane. Dragons were my speciality; they had been since I was very small.

Haru craned over my shoulder to look at my drawing.

"That dragon again, Chihiro-san?" he said in an amused voice.

"Yes, Haru-chan." I replied with a smile, using affectionate the childish language I normally used when I addressed him.

"Lucky our course is focused on mythical creatures then."

He started to pack his silk paints away into his satchel, the length of silk he should have been working on virtually untouched.

We both went to a specialist art college in a city about thirty miles away from my village, rather than a senior high school that most other people our age attended. Our course was relatively open, so we could use whichever mediums and focus artists that we wished for our pieces of work. Haru was predominantly a painter and often worked on fabric. I, however, was a sketcher, using pencils in countless different colours. The course was excellent but we had to wear a uniform, which sucked. The worst bit about the uniform was that it was a navy and white sailor fuku uniform, the type generally favoured by elementary schools. It was ridiculous and embarrassing for us to wear as we were sixteen years old or older while twelve year olds wore a similar uniform.

I, too, packed away. I flipped my sketchbook shut and gathered my pencils. I threw some of them into my tiny purse-bag but it was too small for all of them. I stuck a few of my pencils in my topknot and carried my A2 sketchbook in the crook of my arm, supporting it with my hip. I gestured at Haru to tell him that I was ready to leave.

We soon stepped out into the street, absorbed into a big crush of similarly clad students that was heading to the station.

"Ah Haru-chan," I said in a mock-grave voice, "I fear today has been a wasted day in our lives. I have only drawn one small drawing while you have done nothing at all."

I sighed dramatically and brought a hand to my chest in mock despair. It was enough to make Haru laugh.

"Well ChiChi-chan, perhaps you should stop daydreaming, that means you would get more work done and I could concentrate. It's hilarious when you go all spaced-out, I can't help but watch you."

We both laughed then, entering the station and getting through the ticket barriers. Haru was so lucky; he only lived three stops away. I had to wait for an extra six stops to get to the town next to my village. I then had to catch the hourly bus to my village. The whole journey took about an hour and a half everyday each way. It was painfully boring.

Our train turned up exactly on time and left the station promptly. Haru and I sat side-by-side but didn't talk anymore. He, as soon as he sat down, began to scribble in his notebook while I took my mobile from my bag. I occasionally took sneaky, sideways glances at him.

Haru must have been about six feet tall; I was relatively tall for a woman at five feet seven inches tall but he completely dwarfed me. He was also ridiculously good looking with round blue eyes and floppy blonde hair that he inherited from his Caucasian mother. He had an adorable five o'clock shadow and an impressive body. He had long string of girls who were madly in love with him and sometimes I didn't understand why I wasn't in love with him myself. I knew him and his kind personality better than anybody else and at times I was sure he was flirting with me. No matter how many times I tried I could not bring myself to love him. It was almost as if my heart had already been taken by someone else and I was reserving myself for them. Either that or I was a lesbian. However I didn't recall falling for someone else and I was not a lesbian so I just assumed that I just hadn't found the right guy yet.

I sighed slightly as I silently observed him and I turned away, unable to bear the turmoil of my thoughts any longer. I caught sight of my reflection in the window opposite me and grimaced.

The old, lost Chihiro was beginning to return. My pointy face looked fatigued and pale, my grey-blue eyes dull and my complexion showing no brilliancy. My lips were so small that they looked pursed. My figure also looked as if it was giving up, my stick-like body had no muscle definition and my breasts were still pitifully small, remaining at a 32B. My hair had no shine or bounce in its topknot and my shoulders slumped in a similar fashion as my hair. My listlessness had returned for sure.

Unable to bear looking at my reflection for a moment longer, I turned my head to look at other things. Periodically I would swivel my eyes to look between different objects. I stared intently at a young man with an enormous stretcher in his ear before turning my gaze onto a battered, old, leather suitcase in the luggage rack. Soon, however, my despair took hold of me again for the first time in years and I had to shut my eyes to stop myself from crying.

An enormous baby appeared in front of me in the darkness, standing clad in a red apron. The baby began to shrink, turning into a little and violet-coloured mouse. The mouse was suddenly snatched up by a white dragon with a blue mane. The dragon travelled through many tunnels before falling through a wooden ceiling fan. It landed on the floor and dissolved in a shower of pearly white scales, leaving behind a golden seal. A greasy, black slug sprouted from the seal before being squashed by an old woman. An identical woman stood next to the other one. However, the latter had a steely light in her eyes while the other looked a kindly old woman. The kind woman suddenly split in two while the other was replaced by a tall black spirit with a mask for a face. He then opened his mouth, which was actually below the mask, and he swallowed me. Then out of the gloom, there was a pair of beautiful, emerald green eyes.

"H…H…H." I said quietly **(AN. The H sounds like when you speak it at the start of a name, e.g. Haru)**.

"Chihiro?" someone called, shaking my shoulders.

"H…hatchoo!" I sneezed. My vision cleared and I saw Haru standing over me.

"Sorry I woke you up. I just wanted to say bye; we'll be at my stop in a minute."

"Ah. Thanks Haru." I replied, even though I was not in the slightest bit grateful.

"Bye then, Sen."

"Bye."

The train pulled into Haru's stop and he leapt off of the train in high spirits. I saw him climbing the bridge to the opposite platform as we passed him. Soon we left the outskirts of his suburban oasis and were hurtling through the unnamed countryside.

I relaxed again in my seat and began to think. The things that appeared in my dream must be related to my memory loss and listlessness. Once again I tried desperately to recall what had happened during the few days of my life that I had lost, but the mental block held fast. None of the things I saw made much sense; I was sure that they were some types of monsters or spirits. I was not sure if I believed in all the myths. A child-like part of me wished that witches, spirits and dragons were real but I was seventeen years of age and a sceptic; if I couldn't see something, I didn't believe it.

I shook my head to dismiss the madness of it all; it made my head ache to think about it. Instead I focused on the one constant, the eyes. Those eyes had constantly haunted me for seven years and I was a hundred per cent sure that I had met the person those eyes belonged to during my period of memory loss. The eyes were too familiar to just be a simple creation of my imagination. Some part of me also seemed to know that the person behind those eyes was the reason that I couldn't fall in love with Haru. If that was true they were also almost certainly the reason why I felt I like was waiting for something or someone. I desperately tried to match faces with the eyes but to no avail.

My inability to remember anything angered me and I kicked the wall in rage. I received a reproachful look from a lady sat nearby but I ignored her. At long last I arrived at my stop and I departed with a small crowd of junior high school kids and a few people I knew from college.

"Shit!" I cursed as I checked my watch. I raced as quickly as I could through the ticket barriers, ran out into the road and in front of the bus that was pulling away my usual bus stop. Luckily for me the driver braked sharply and I was unharmed, just shaken up.

I ran round to the side of the bus and boarded through the half closed doors. I flashed my pass at the driver and collapsed, panting into the first empty seat that I saw. Some of the other passengers grumbled about the minor delay in departing but I could barely hear them. I was just relieved that I didn't have to wait another hour for the next bus.

I watched out of the window as shops, trees, cars and people flew by in a flurry of colour. I was unsure of what to do next. My father was at that time on a business trip in Tokyo and my mother wouldn't have come home for at least another hour. I didn't feel like sitting in the empty house by myself so I was at a loss of what to do in the meantime. My village wasn't exactly the shopping hub of Northern Japan, having only a bakery, a post office and a grocery store. The eureka moment then hit me; I would go to my special place! It was down the hill, in a forest near my house. I could sit there for a long time, not being disturbed, but not far from my home. It was perfect really.

The bus stopped near the cross roads, which lay just outside my village. I hopped off and walked the edge of the only main road leading to my village. It was up a slight incline and soon I reached a slightly overgrown dirt track. I looked up past the forest which surrounded the path and saw my little blue house peeking above the treetops. My bedroom overlooked the track so I knew that people never went down it. Occasionally a car would back into the mouth of the road to turn around but nobody else except me travelled the whole way down it, as far as I knew. I was sure that only my parents and I knew it was there. They told me that many theme parks were built in the nineties and when the economy failed, most of them had to close. My special place was one of the ones that had to close. The gate was completely boarded up but I often sat there for hours, drawing. I often tried to shift the wooden board which covered the entrance but it was far too heavy to move.

As I walked down the lane, I passed little shrines which were said to house spirits and large, double-sided statues. When I first went there with my parents, I remember being terrified of them but at seventeen I just found them sweet.

Soon the white, red-roofed, plastic gate appeared before me but something was different. The wooden board was gone and I could see behind it there was a long, black tunnel. Something clicked in my brain. The tunnel in front of me was the first and last thing I remembered about the missing few days in my memories.

"_Perhaps it could help me!" _I thought.

I approached the tunnel curiously but when I got close to it the atmosphere was different. The air felt close. The usually welcoming gate towered over me menacingly and a chilled wind blew around my ankles as if it was taunting me to go in.

The cruel fingers of fear curled around my heart and I choked. I turned on my tail and ran from the gate, vowing to never return. I wanted to take the short cut up the hill but I usually reserved that for coming down from my house while I walked the long way back, as it wasn't safe to walk back up it. The long way was to follow the main road up through the centre of my village and along to my house right at the end of it. It was longer but not too long, as my village was only small, so I decided not to chance it.

I crashed out from the path to the main road and began to, slowly, climb the hill. I followed the road as it snaked round to the right, and then to the left when I reached the last house on the opposite end of the village to my home.

I began to walk down the only street. I passed my old elementary school. It was chucking out time and I was caught up in a wave of sailor fuku clad kids, their chirpy parents and any younger siblings. I felt ridiculous in my child-like uniform. I was over ten years older than some of the younger ones but I was wearing something terribly similar.

I tried to skirt round them but I was trapped by a pair of buggies. I swore the babies in them smirked at me as I was forced to tag along with the peloton of mummies, daddies and kiddies that moved along at a snail's pace.

I ground me teeth at my misfortune and I shifted my sketchbook on my hip, thinking how ironic it was that I was running ten minutes before but was then merely ambling.

"Hey!" a male voice called.

A hand wrapped around my wrist and startled, my sketchbook plummeted to the floor. All the papers which were tucked inside it fell out, scattering, and the page fell open to my latest dragon drawing.

The group I had been walking in parted around my unwanted companion and I like the Red sea before regrouping ahead.

"Excuse me but do you mind letting go of my arm?" I demanded in a hoity-toity voice as I turned to face my assailant.

I instantly regretted my rudeness. The young man in front of me was absolutely gorgeous. He had neat shoulder length hair with bangs that looked black but was in fact a very dark green. His skin was pale and glowing and he had an incredible, lean but still defined body which was dressed in a cream kimono with blue accents, a matching blue sash and blue trousers. He looked a little strange in his traditional dress but he was so handsome that it didn't matter at all. He must have been at least twenty years old and there was something familiar about him that I couldn't place a finger on.

Our eyes caught each other. My own eyes widened as I stared into his. His eyes were almond shaped and a gorgeous shade of emerald green. He was the owner of the eyes that haunted me for so long? His eyes softened a little as he stared into mine. My mouth hung open a little, dumbfounded.

The young man relaxed his grip on my wrist a little but kept strong eye contact with me, as if he couldn't tear them away.

"Chihiro, I'm so glad that I finally found you." he whispered in a soft, low voice.

I peered into his emerald eyes, looking for any hints as to who he was. My vision suddenly glazed over.

My parents and I entered the tunnel and walked through it. On the other side there was a beautiful field and many statues. My parents were eating huge amounts of food at a dilapidated, abandoned restaurant. I left them and found a massive, elaborate bath house. A younger version of the man in front of me told me to leave before it was too late as whatever 'they' are were beginning to light the lamps. He stayed behind to distract whatever 'they' are and I ran to get to my parents, spirits appearing all around me. I found my parents had turned into enormous pigs. I was forced to stay in the Spirit World but almost disappeared because I hadn't eaten anything there. The boy gave me food and hid me before telling me to get a job with the boiler man. A man with six arms, susuwatari and a weasel spirit, Rin, flashed before me. Rin helped me find my way almost to the top floor of the bath house but got caught up by a frog spirit. A radish spirit then helped me to find the floor the witch I had to bargain with, Yubaaba, lived. The witch tried to send me away but as I woke up her massive baby she gave me a job to shut me up. She stole my name as a result and I almost forgot it but the boy helped me to remember it after he took me to the pig pen to see my parents. He then turns into a dragon and flies away. I let Kaonashi in through a door. I helped to cleanse a river spirit of pollution and as a result earned the bath house a lot of gold while he gave me an emetic cake. I tried to feed it to my parents but I didn't know which pigs they were. The white dragon was being chased by shikigami and crashed into Yubaaba's pent house. I climbed up to her pent house with one on my back, which then turned into Yubaaba's twin, Zeniiba. She turned Boh into a mouse and the Yu-bird into a tiny baby bird before she split in half. The bird, mouse, dragon and I fell down the vent in Yubaaba's room before crashing through the fan into Kamaji's boiler room. I fed him part of the emetic cake and he coughed up a gold seal and a greasy black slug which I stamped on. The dragon turned back into the boy. Then I was chased through the bath house by an enormous, vomiting Kaonashi. I took the seal, Kaonashi, the bird and the mouse on the train to Zeniiba's house. The benevolent old witch asked me to call her Granny and wove me a purple silk hair tie with the help of Boh and Yu-bird. The dragon arrived and took Boh, the Yu-bird and I back to to the bath house. Kaonashi decided to stay behind. While on his back I remembered falling in a river and being washed to shore. I told the dragon its name was the Kohaku River and I thought that it was him. He turned into a boy again and told me his real name was Nigihayami Kohaku Nushi. I then correctly guess that none of the pigs Yubaaba showed me was my parents and we get to go home. The boy promised that we would meet again.

My flashback ended and I looked again happily at the young man in front of me, now able to remember everything.

"Haku!" I yelled, leaping at him and wrapping my arms around his neck. He hugged my waist in return.

Tears welled up in my eyes and I began to cry, my cheek pressed firmly against his neck. My sketchbook lay forgotten and trampled upon under my feet, a lot of the sheets already long gone.

As I cuddled the first and only young man I had every loved I realised that I was absolutely livid with him at taking so long to keep his promise. I wrenched myself away from him and began hitting his arms and chest, wanting to hurt him as he hurt me.

"Why did you make me wait so long for you, you bastard?" I screamed, pummelling him with each word. The tears rolled harder down my face than before, creating shining tracks and obscuring my vision.

He caught both of my hands and held them close to him.

"I'm sorry Chihiro but it takes ages to get an appointment with Lady Amaterasu. It took me seven years to get one."

I knew that Amaterasu was a major deity in the Ancient Shinto religion in Japan. I had no idea that she actually existed though as I was not a big believer in faith like my parents.

"What did you go and see her for if you were supposed to be keeping your promise to me?!" I hissed at him through my tears.

"I saw her about becoming a human."

My mind whirled with my private thoughts and I felt faint but no words left my mouth; I had nothing to say to him. The tears came less rapidly but were just as large as before.

"I have to sleep here during the night for the spell to work. Then I'll be a human just like you or him there." Haku continued, gesturing at a startled man across the other side of the street. I continued to stare at him, shivering.

He looked back at me and frowned.

"What's wrong?"

"Why…why would you do that? Why would you give up your immortality?" I asked tearfully. He smiled warmly and brought my left hand to his lips.

"You honestly don't know? I am becoming a human because I love you and I'd rather have one lifetime with you than live forever without you."

The tears fell stronger again but they were no longer bitter, they were tears of joy.

"Thank goodness," I whispered hoarsely, "I thought that you didn't feel the same. We were just kids."

"You never stop loving someone, Chihiro" he said lovingly.

His eyes glowing with happiness, he let go of my hands and snaked his arms back around my waist, pulling me into his body. I gently touched one of my hands to his cheek and without hesitation, my lips touched his.

The world disappeared around us, replaced with splashes of silver. At first the kiss was gentle but soon his arms pulled me even tighter into him and ours lips repeatedly remoulded and slotted back together passionately. My hand left his face and both of them tangled themselves in his soft hair. Our bodies were of no use to us. We were just two souls gesturing, caressing and just needing each other. I had my memories and the love of my life back. Right then that was all that mattered. Never before had I been happier.

**AN. Hey it's Randomwriting98 here! I hope you enjoyed this little piece of fluff here. Remember to R&R. An author can only get better if they get feedback. Thank you for reading! Have a nice day and be awesome!**


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